Chasing the Screen: My Side of the Story

I spent a good chunk of my formative years in Moulamein, the oldest town in the Riverina, and storytelling got hold of me early. I wrote short stories and read them out to the entire school. When that stopped being enough, I started performing them, playing outrageous characters for anyone who would watch. The buzz of a live audience responding to something I made is a feeling I have been chasing ever since.

Are we doing this thing? Apparently!

There was a delusional patch in my pre-teen years where I genuinely believed I would be the next Mel Gibson. By uni I had downgraded to the more achievable ambition of being the next Ben Mendelsohn or Noah Taylor. I never scaled those heights, but the acting career was real: TV shows, commercials and eventually films, working alongside some of Australia's best known talent. I was, and remain, honoured by all of it.

Between acting and now, I spent years in real estate and then built my own media and videography business. I became an entrepreneur who never stopped yearning for the art. And the whole time, one question kept nagging at me: why doesn't the screen industry work like sport? Both need loyal followers and a spectacle. One delivers regular, predictable commercial success. The other lurches from funding round to funding round, hostage to government backing and timing. What's the missing ingredient? How do you build a company that tells globally appealing stories with a local workforce, without holding its breath for a grant?

It turns out I wasn't the only one asking. I had put a very modest amount of money into a film shooting in Adelaide, Matthew Holmes's "Ballad of a Sundowner", and on set I met people who became friends fast. South Australia, it seems, breeds filmmakers who refuse to let funding challenges stand between them and ambitious work.

I interviewed actor and producer Brendan Cooney, who had just released the excellent "Within the Pines" with his co-producers Dion Cavellaro and Paul Evans Thomas.

Pirie Martin on the left and me on the right. Too ambitious? Maybe...

And I interviewed a filmmaker named Pirie Martin, straight after watching his debut feature, "Psychosis". I admired Pirie’s obvious talent - it reminded me of the purity of ambition in the Robert Roderiguez book “Rebel without a Crew”.

Those interviews started as research into the kernel of an idea: a company that could produce a reliable slate of creative work, so investors could spread their risk across many projects instead of betting everything on one film.

Within weeks, the kernel had grown into a brains trust of sorts, meeting online regularly to thrash out a genre-driven vehicle for the screen industry.

The problems are well known. The solutions seem obvious. Now we have to actually build the thing.

So that's what we're doing, in public. Over the past few months, Pirie and I have been making a podcast called "Chasing the Screen", a building-in-public series about bringing the company to life.

We've already sat down with key industry leaders and practitioners, and two days ago, we launched!

We're building the company and the audience at the same time, and we'd like you along for both.

This is my side of the story. You can read Pirie's side here.

You can also check out our new podcast on any of your favourite apps.